The Daily - America’s Education Problem

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

For decades, the U.S. spent billions of dollars trying to close its education gap with the rest of the world. New data shows that all that money made little difference. Today, we investigate how that could be. Guest: Dana Goldstein, a national correspondent for The New York Times who covers education. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:The past three American presidents have tried to help the U.S. education system compete with other countries. Test scores haven’t improved.The “Nation’s Report Card” came out this fall. It indicated that two-thirds of children in the U.S. are not proficient readers.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today, for decades, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars trying to close its education gap with the rest of the world. New data shows that all that money made no difference. Dana Goldstein on how that could be. It's Thursday, December 5th. Dana, when did the United States start to feel a sense of anxiety

around the education levels of our children in relation to the rest of the world. Well, I think back to 1957. But the biggest news to come out of Russia was the story of the year, perhaps of our generation. And that was the year that the Russians beat us to space. Their radio beep signaling not merely a red scientific triumph, but the launching of mankind into a new era,

the dawn of the age of space. Sputnik and Mutnik, they were called. With their Sputnik satellite. And this triggered a sort of national conversation and anxiety in the United States among our political leaders

and the public. We were the country that beat back tyranny and saved the world in World War I and World War II. What did it mean that this other nation could outperform us in this new frontier of space? And that was the start of a conversation about our schools and if they were preparing kids to compete on the global stage.

This continues in the 1980s with the rise of Japan and the rise of China and with the reduction of these good factory jobs that used to insure Americans a middle-class life. So by the 1990s, there's a consensus among education reformers and politicians who care about this that maybe it would be helpful to have Washington play a role and the federal government get involved. And a few governors whose names we've all heard of, like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, are those that agree. Oftentimes we talk about our children having self-esteem. You can't teach self-esteem.

But when we teach our children to read and write and add and subtract, they learn self-esteem. They earn it. And that's the whole vision for America is that every child gets educated. earn it. And that's the whole vision for America, is that every child gets educated. When George W. Bush was running for president, this was the conversation that he was immersed in. And in fact, he makes education reform and the idea of a bigger role for Washington part of his pitch as a different kind of, quote, compassionate conservative. That's how he defines himself. He says he really does care about those that are getting left behind in this new globalized economy. And he says he really does care about helping low-income students and

students of color do better academically so they can compete. It's good to meet you all. Thanks. What grade are we in? Six. Cool. Let me ask you a question. How many of you are going to go to college? Me! Good. How many of you read more than you watch TV? Me! Tell the truth. Honestly. Okay, good. How many of you practice math more than you watch TV?

And at this moment, what is the relationship between the federal government in Washington and states when it comes to education? So it's pretty hands-off. They send money, especially money for schools that serve a lot of low-income children, but they don't have a lot of requirements attached to that money. They also oversee civil rights in schools, so they're on the lookout to see if there's racial discrimination, gender discrimination. But they don't tell states how they should oversee schools, and all this starts to change when George W. Bush is elected president, and he represents this group of people who think this approach has been too

hands-off, and we're not going to really be able to compete with the rest of the world, where education systems are very centralized and much more top-down than our American system, if we don't have some leadership from Washington. And that's why he proposes and signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act. And what is No Child Left Behind? No Child Left Behind is basically a testing law. It asks states to test students in third through eighth grade every year in math and reading and once in high school. And this is totally new. The federal government has never before asked states to test students.

And it's interesting because I am 35 and my whole education preceded this law. And I have just a few memories in elementary school of taking standardized tests. And they weren't really something people talked about a lot. It's completely different now. And I think for a lot of adults who didn't go through this system, they may not realize how different it really is. And what was the thinking behind suddenly requiring standardized testing in No Child Left Behind? I mean, the thinking was pretty simple. If you don't collect this data, you just can't know how students are doing.

And if you don't know how students are doing, you can't help them improve. So with these test scores, you can finally say, how are low-income students doing? How are African-American students doing? How are African-American students doing? How are immigrant students doing? If you don't collect this data nationally, you don't know. So while the data is very helpful to education researchers, the No Child Left Behind Act is widely seen as a failure. I think two big reasons. seen as a failure. Why? I think two big reasons. The first is that all 50 states had total freedom to define for themselves what was going to be on all these tests. It wasn't one test. Nope,

it was 50 different tests. And so Alabama might have a lot easier of a test than Massachusetts. And so it becomes really hard to compare how kids are doing across the states. And suddenly, it seems like this isn't actually that helpful of a national tool. If the states are basically allowed to set their own yardstick, each of these governors has an incentive to make themselves look good. And the other big reason why it failed was just the tests were not that high quality and the teachers were teaching to the test because schools could be declared failing if students were not moving forward on these exams

and not scoring well enough. And when Barack Obama is elected president, Leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in math, science, technology, and engineering. But despite the importance of education in these subjects, we have to admit, we are right now being outpaced by our competitors. Barack Obama agreed with George W. Bush about a lot when it came to education. He believed in a bigger role for Washington. He was deeply concerned about achievement gaps similar to George W. Bush. They represented sort of the two sides of the coin within this bipartisan consensus.

So make no mistake, our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow. He comes up with his own policies that he hopes are going to address the flaws of No Child Left Behind while sort of better succeeding in the original goal. He is going to have better tests, basically, and he's going to hold schools and teachers accountable to more high-quality standards. And they're going to be shared across the country instead of 50 states. So what does that solution look like? So it's convenient for President Obama that a bunch of governors and education reformers and philanthropists like Bill Gates, they were already kind of together

trying to solve this problem. And they had started talking about something that would come to be called the Common Core State Standards, which would be a national effort to write curriculum standards in reading and math that all 50 states could hopefully share. And Obama takes a look at this, and he loves the idea. The Obama administration did give money through a program called Race to the Top to states that adopted the Common Core. And how did that work? The way it worked is states were competing for about $4 billion in federal funding. It was the recession. The states were broke.

They were desperate for cash. And they would have done pretty much anything that was asked of them. And Obama gave them a lot of priorities that he wanted them to fulfill to get this money. And one of them was to adopt rigorous shared standards. He did not specifically say the Common Core, but that's what it was because the effort was already underway. And all across state houses across the country, people knew about this. So again, as with No Child Left Behind, this is not the federal government mandating one vision of American education, but they're profoundly encouraging it.

Yes, encouraging it. And right off the bat, within the first year, the vast majority, over 40 of the states said, OK, we're in. We're going to do the Common Core. California Board of Education today unanimously approved new and rigorous guidelines. New uniform educational standards are expected to raise the bar for students in Maryland starting next year. The Common Core Standards Program. This curriculum is really going to be historic, and it's going to help better prepare our students for this hyper-competitive global economy. Certainly the federal government has stepped up with the Common Core Standards and the idea that we develop a national test that tests children really in all of the skills, not just in the... And those tests do hit the market, and that does become how many teachers and parents and students first encounter this thing, the Common Core, is through the tests.

So did Obama's vision here of national standards and incentives for states to adopt them, did it succeed in its goals? It did not quite work out as intended. It's actually this incredible, strange moment where people on the far right and the far left agree that they don't like, in fact, they detest the Common Core. On the left, it's really about anti-testing fervor. Parents hated that their kids were going to school and being presented with these multiple-choice problems, and the curriculum was narrowing to these math and reading tests. was narrowing to these math and reading tests. So social studies, arts, even science, the number of minutes per day that kids were encountering all these wonderful things was decreasing because the teachers were so stressed out about these math and reading exams. And what parents on the left were saying is, this is not what I want from my child public school. Parents, in fact, are deciding to opt out.

There's the birth of this opt-out movement, which is a movement to encourage parents to opt their kids out of sitting for these exams. And places like New York State, where as many as 165,000 students opted out. So this opt-out movement really reaches a peak in New York State in 2015, when 20% of students opt out. And in some schools, it's close to 100%. Thankfully, most of us began to listen to the cry for help coming from our children. Parents refused to allow their children to be part of the Common Core testing machine. At the same time, Tea Party activists on the right

are railing against the Common Core. They see it as a sort of classic big government, federal incursion into local control. We need to do in education what's always worked historically, and that's local control. You have Tea Party darling Michelle Bachman. I would take the entire federal education law, repeal it. Then I would go over to the Department of Education.

I'd turn out the lights. I'd lock the door and all the money back to the state and localities. Wailing against the Common Core. And all of a sudden, where it had been acceptable for Republicans to join with President Obama and support this thing, all of a sudden, states across this country, it's not okay anymore. And it's also not okay in many places to be a Democrat who speaks in favor of this because of the opposition on the left. So you see all these states, more than 20 states, start to roll back these laws. these states, more than 20 states, start to roll back these laws and states start to pull out of the agreement to use shared tests and start saying, we're going to go get our own test and develop our

own test. So there's a pretty broad-based refusal to adopt this idea of a national set of standards and curriculum. But that would seem to make a system that's built on the goal of centralization basically impossible. Yeah, it's really, really hard to do anything centrally in our system because we don't have a system that was created to be centralized. Local control was sort of the founding orthodoxy of American public education in the 19th century. Our Constitution does not include the word education. There's no sort of role for the federal government that allows them to reach into schools, reach into classrooms, change practices. It's all sort of, you know, carrots and sticks, options.

And it doesn't work that well. It's very, very hard to make change on a national scale when that's the system that you've built. So whatever consensus had been achieved by this point through the Bush and Obama eras, that this was a worthy goal, national standards, a national system, that starts to unravel. It's starting to fall apart.

We'll be right back. Dana, so bring us up to today. Where are we in this process? So over the past few weeks, two big new pieces of evidence have come out, and they paint a pretty depressing picture for American education and American kids. The first was the gold standard tool that researchers use to look at American education. It's called the National Assessment of Educational

Progress. It showed that only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders can be considered proficient readers, just a third. And across the board at every level, students had declining reading scores over the past two years. Declining. Yeah, going down. With all these efforts to make things better, the scores were going down. So this was a very sad day for many in the world of education, the world that I've been covering for over a decade. many in the world of education, the world that I've been covering for over a decade. And then just a few days ago, I had another sad story to report, which was on the test that is considered the gold standard international global test, the Program for International Student

Achievement. It showed that there were 20% of American 15-year-olds who do not read as well as they should at age 10. So they really are missing very basic reading comprehension skills. And it found that American performance is flat in both reading and math since 2000. So this entire time period that we've been discussing, ever since George W. Bush was elected and no child left behind, through President Obama and Race to the top and Common Core and effort after effort to try to get American kids to do better on these types of international exams. American performance has not changed. It's stagnant.

Despite not just all those programs, but I presume the billions of dollars spent to put them in place. Many, many billions of dollars, private dollars, public dollars, all of that. This all sounds quite bad and quite depressing, but I wonder ultimately how much the scores you're describing here, especially comparing U.S. students to international students, really matters. Because the United States very much remains a global superpower. We have one of the strongest economies on the planet. We have low unemployment. So if you kind of swallow your national pride, is this really a crisis? I think it is. I mean, how can you feel pride when you think about that 15-year-old who can't read as well as a 10-year-old should? With those types of literacy skills, they're not going to be suited for work

that's going to pay a living wage in this economy that we're living in. And just beyond that, beyond what happens to that person on the job market, education is about so much more. That person needs to be a citizen. That's why we started public education in the United States, so that we could create people who would be good voters and make wise choices about who their leaders should be. And there's this one statistic from the international exam that just came out that I just keep going back to because this number upset me, which was that only 14% of American students could distinguish reliably between fact and opinion. 14% is kind of extraordinary. How did they measure that? fact and opinion. 14% is kind of extraordinary. How did they measure that? So I have a sample question from the exam here in front of me that illustrates what it is that American kids can't do.

And the exercise goes like this. It shows students two pieces of writing. One is a news article about research on milk and whether it has health benefits or health detriments. So this is classic journalism. Pretty much, yeah. And the second is produced by a group that students are told is called the International Dairy Foods Association, and it speaks to all the wonderful benefits of drinking milk. So this is something from a trade group. Exactly.

Students are then presented with a series of statements based on what they've read, and they are asked to determine, is this a fact or an opinion? And I'll give you an example. Drinking milk and other dairy products is the best way to lose weight. Factor opinion. Opinion. Exactly. It's opinion put forward by people that want the public to purchase more milk products. The tradeion. Exactly. It's opinion put forward by people that want the public to purchase more

milk products. The trade group. Exactly. And these are the types of questions that the majority of American students were not able to get right. They're failing to distinguish between fact and opinion, between that which is being told to them by people with specific interests and those that are objectively true, the result of research or investigation by reporters. Exactly. And think about the implications of this in a world where there's so much misinformation

on social media, political advertisements that are trying to sway your opinion. Foreign countries interfering in elections. Exactly. And we can't even agree, for example, in this country, whether it is Ukraine or Russia that influenced our election in 2016. Even though we know it was Russia that meddled. There really is no question on the facts. So when I hear that, you know, only 14 percent of

American students are getting this type of question correct, I think it raises big questions, not just about our economic competitiveness or are these kids well-suited to the workforce, but about our country, our future. Are they being prepared to be citizens? And how will that affect all of us? So these questions about education performance are very deep. They go to the core of who we are as Americans and what our future will hold. And it makes me think that some of our core American values of, you know, American exceptionalism and individualism and local control, these orthodoxies, which we're proud of and rightfully so in many ways because they've

contributed to what's different about the United States and driven local innovation, United States and driven local innovation, but they're also now contributing to this intractable, difficult, important problem to solve, which is how do we truly prepare our kids to succeed, not just as workers, but also as human beings and as citizens of this country. Dana, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

If what we're talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable. This is precisely the misconduct that the framers created a constitution, including impeachment, to protect against. During testimony on Wednesday, three law professors told the House Judiciary Committee that President Trump's attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals crossed constitutional lines and amounted to impeachable conduct. One of them, Stanford law professor Pamela Carlin, was asked whether the president's conduct was grounds for impeachment, even if the investigations he requested were never carried out. Imagine that you were pulled over for speeding by a police officer and the officer comes up to

the window and says, you were speeding, but you know, if you give me 20 bucks, I'll drop the ticket. And you look in your wallet and you say to the officer, I don't have the 20 bucks. The officer says, OK, well, just go ahead. Have a nice day. The officer would still be guilty of soliciting a bribe there, even though he ultimately let you off without without your paying. But a law professor called by Republicans on the committee, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, testified that Democrats had not sufficiently proven their case against the president. I'm concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. I believe this impeachment not only fails to satisfy the standard of past impeachments, but would create a dangerous precedent for future impeachments. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.